Final thoughts

Reaching the end of this review, I'm stuck with some sort of mixed feeling. My first dive into the world of DDR3 was not all that I dreamed about, but littered with difficulty, drawbacks, unexpected failures and last but not least: hard work. All this has nothing to do with the ram itself however, just with the fact that I chose the wrong motherboard. Today, Intel's P45 is just not mature enough to handle the high frequencies of DDR3, the board clocks great on lower frequencies, in the zone let's say of DDR2 or slightly higher, with low latencies on the memory. P45 is an excellent chipset for DDR2 by the way, but take my advice and stay clear until its next revision for DDR3. We hear whispers that a new revision is in the works, so let's cross our fingers. I personally do not expect much to come out of this, with Nehalem (or Core i7) at our doorstep by the end of the year.

You can't say I didn't warn you up front that this was going to be a motherboard review to some degree, but I think we said enough about our Asus board now. We will be moving this and our next DDR3 memory to a new arrival in our labs : the DFI X48-T3RS. You may expect a dedicated review of this board soon here at Madshrimps, and we'll all see what the memory is made of on that board. Expect different behaviour, to say the least...

Back to our memory now. Actually, the memory itself was a dream to work with. After we solved the multiplier glitch with the motherboard, the memory moved to 2Ghz without complaining. It actually felt like it was barely stretching its legs. 1.85 Volts was enough to reach 2Ghz, and though our motherboard wouldn't play getting higher, I have no doubt the memory is capable of more. Instead, we shaved of a cycle of the TRP latency, improving bandwidth a little more. Although OCZ does not advertise this Samsung-based memory as low latency, they are quite capable of it. The modules cannot go as low as the Micron-based chips - they are a little picky on the TRCD latency - but on the other hand they are never at a great distance. Where the Sammy's really shine is in the high frequency though, and as I already mentioned, 2 Ghz is no problem at all.

Another benefit is compatibility, as web reports have pointed out that they offer better compatibility than their Micron counterparts, especially on the P45 platform. It is hard to fault these modules, and as an enthusiast, they are a keeper for me. As mentioned, there are some memory kits out there that have a slightly higher specification, but given the trouble we already had with our board, who'd want them anyway? I am keen on finding out the real maximum of these modules when testing the DFI board, we'll find out together pretty soon I guess. If I have to give a negative it would be in the performance gains - or better: lack thereof - that we encountered when tuning the memory. The higher frequencies only gave single digit improvements, and only when looking at the highest front side bus speeds. At low front side bus speeds, low latency was the way to go. Again, this says more about the motherboard than the ram, so we'll leave it at that and look forward to some more testing on another platform.

Last but not least, the Price of €178 (Europe, Geizhals.eu) and $260 (US, Froogle.com) is in my opinion completely justified and in line with what you get : a full water-cooling setup for the enthusiast, and trouble free operation (with the right motherboard, or if you're willing to take your time) at the highest available frequencies of DDR3. The only choice you'll have to make is if you really want these high frequencies at this point in time, again given the motherboard trouble we encountered. You could opt for 2Gb of the excellent OCZ EB memory for example, which is Micron based and excellent with low latencies. Price-wise they are matched, a difficult choice to make in my book...



Conclusions

So have a look at our take on the OCZ Flex II PC3-16000 kit :

Great looking kit with excellent build quality.
Excellent performance headroom, ahead of current motherboard capabilities
All parts for water-cooling fun included
Very decent price-performance ratio
Proven OCZ warranty and support, EVP up to 1.95 Volts

Rather disappointing performance gains for overclocked memory
Stay clear from the P45 chipset : it does not support 2Ghz Ram out of the box, for now

Recommended for

(click image for info on these tags)

For further reading on the DDR3 subject, I'd gladly point you towards the following sites :

The "DDR3: what's new ?" page from X-bit labs.

Anandtech's "What is DDR3 ?"

Wikipedia's wiki on DDR3

A nice overview from the Benchmark reviews.com site

JEDEC's official DDR3 white paper (.pdf)

Thank you !

At this point a very well deserved thank you goes out to Tobias from OCZ Technology, who was kind enough to lend us another great DDR2 kit for a test drive, and I hope he will continue his trust in our site as a review platform for years to come. Also another thank you to Tony Leach for the help and the sharing of the (mutual) trouble of getting the P5Q3 to behave, and our (mutual) failure in doing so ;-)

Another big thank you goes to Emanuel and Bram from Tones, the biggest computer (web)shop in Belgium, for providing motherboard and cpu for this review. Thanks guys, hope to see you next time !



I hope you liked this little review of the latest OCZ kit. Thanks for reading and see you soon!